Codehelp blog

1. My Orange 3G mobile broadband USB modem won't operate properly with gnome-ppp because it doesn't use a real username or password and needs more customised chatscript support than gnome-ppp appears to be able to support.


2. I stopped using network-manager-gnome and started using wicd instead due to problems with nm-applet at that time, which doesn't see the USB modem (and doesn't drop wlan0 for it either). I'm not sure if nm-applet would now work with the USB modem.


3. I've got the modem working with sudo pon orange but I wanted a GUI.

Instead - and, frankly, just as an experiment to get used to auto-detecting things - I decided to write a little program that puts a status icon in place if HAL reports no modem capability, then raises a simple window to manage the connection when the modem becomes available. (I had a shell script using zenity that was almost good enough but without automated launch.)

The window is trivially simple, it just lists the available connections in /etc/ppp/peers and has a toggle button to connect or disconnect the selected connection. Almost no error checking, no configuration support for the pon scripts themselves. I might add a default connection using gconf later. Yes, I know it's HAL but PolicyKit/DeviceKit just seemed too complicated when it was simpler to use libhal's own dbus support.

I'm happy to just use this for me but if anyone else is interested in this kind of app, I might be persuaded to put the source code somewhere public and continue development with a view to uploading to Debian. Naturally, if gnome-ppp or wicd could be adapted to replace it, that would be good too. (I'll file wishlist bugs if it isn't just me who wants this - I only need this functionality for a few months and a quick and dirty version is enough just for me. By the time the bugs are fixed, I probably won't be using mobile broadband any more.)

Further to my previous entry of putting the house on the market, it's now definite that I'm relocating to Cambridge to work as a self-employed application developer with Toby!Churchill.

Time to start hunting for accommodation in Cambridge tomorrow . . .

Yes, aptitude can list packages by priority, but what I wanted was a simple list of just package names. I've got two ways of getting a bare list:

Updated with many thanks to Phil Hands.

$ aptitude search '~prequired'|sed -ne 's/^i [ A] \([^ ]*\).*$/\1/p' | tr '\n' ' ' | sort -u|fold -s ; echo

#!/bin/sh
# Licence: GPL-3+
FILE=`find /var/lib/apt/lists/ -name '*unstable*Packages'`
LIST=`grep-dctrl -n -s Priority '' $FILE |sort -u`

for P in $LIST; do
  [ "optional" != "$P" -a "extra" != "$P" ] || continue
  echo "Priority: $P"
  grep-dctrl -n -s Package,Priority "$P" $FILE | sed -ne '/^'$P'$/!h;/^'$P'$/{g;p}' | tr '\n' ' ' | fold -s
  echo
done

The advantage with the script is that is lists all packages in all priorities except optional and extra and can be restricted to individual Packages files and therefore to individual repositories and components. (Change the find expression if you have more than one repository specifying unstable or adapt the script to accept a path to the relevant Packages file on the command line.)

I really ought to have used perl because pattern matching in perl is a
lot more natural to me than using sed or awk. I do tend to chain a
couple of sed commands, just so that it's easier to work out which bit
is broken when it breaks.

The final version of this script will end up in emdebian-grip-server,
converted to perl with POD content, translated and reading the Packages
files using Debian::Packages::Compare.

$ ~/scripts/list-priority
Priority: important
adduser apt-utils apt aptitude bsdmainutils libbz2-1.0 cpio cron libcwidget3
debian-archive-keyring dhcp3-client dhcp3-common dmidecode ed libgdbm3 gnupg
gpgv groff-base ifupdown iproute iptables iputils-ping logrotate libept0
libsigc++-2.0-0c2a libtasn1-3 libusb-0.1-4 man-db manpages module-init-tools
nano libncursesw5 net-tools netbase netcat-traditional libnewt0.52 whiptail
libssl0.9.8 libpopt0 libreadline5 libreadline6 readline-common rsyslog
tasksel-data tasksel libwrap0 info install-info traceroute udev vim-common
vim-tiny wget libxapian15
Priority: required
libacl1 libattr1 base-files base-passwd bash coreutils debconf-i18n debconf
debianutils diffutils dpkg e2fslibs e2fsprogs libcomerr2 libss2 libc-bin libc6
findutils gcc-4.3-base gcc-4.4-base libgcc1 libstdc++6 grep gzip hostname
lsb-base libdevmapper1.02.1 lzma liblocale-gettext-perl libselinux1 libsepol1
libtext-charwidth-perl libtext-iconv-perl libtext-wrapi18n-perl libunwind7 mawk
libncurses5 ncurses-base ncurses-bin libpam-modules libpam-runtime libpam0g
perl-base procps sed sensible-utils login passwd libslang2 initscripts sysv-rc
sysvinit-utils sysvinit tar tzdata bsdutils libblkid1 libuuid1 mount util-linux
zlib1g
Priority: standard
apt-listchanges at bash-completion bc dc bind9-host dnsutils libbind9-50
libdns53 libisc50 liblwres50 bsd-mailx libsasl2-2 libdb4.8 libdb4.5 libdb4.6
libdb4.7 debian-faq doc-debian doc-linux-text libc6-i386 locales exim4-base
exim4-config exim4-daemon-light exim4 file libmagic1 gettext-base libgnutls26
libgpm2 libkeyutils1 libgssapi-krb5-2 libgssrpc4 libk5crypto3 libkadm5clnt6
libkadm5srv6 libkdb5-4 libkrb5-3 libkrb5support0 less lsof libcap2 libedit2
libevent-1.4-2 libgc1c2 libgcrypt11 libgpg-error0 libgssglue1 libidn11
liblockfile1 libnfsidmap2 librpcsecgss3 libunwind7-dev libxml2 m4 mime-support
mlocate mutt ncurses-term ftp telnet nfs-common libldap-2.4-2 openssh-client
patch libpci3 pciutils libpcre3 perl-modules perl portmap procmail
python-central python-minimal python python2.5-minimal python2.5
python-reportbug reportbug wamerican libsqlite3-0 tcpd texinfo time ucf w3m
whois

Hmm, next step is to check the "Priority: standard" set for Emdebian - it looks far too large for what would be standard on an embedded device. LDAP will be dropped for one - and what is a -dev package doing in there? libunwind7-dev isn't even installed on my amd64 Debian desktop!

Probably check the important and required listings too, then tweak what we need to change via the archive overrides for Emdebian Grip.

Come to think of it, I might need a PHP version of this to read live data from the repository, documenting the changes.

Sometimes, the main task at any one time is simply going to take time and cannot be shortened. With my poor network connection, this tends to occur any time I need to do network tasks like multistrap and debootstrap tests, archive updates and the rest. The problem is that my network connection is so bad, most apt type tasks completely saturate all available bandwidth, especially when downloading a single large package like those built from gcc or OOo.

Thankfully, gpdftext has provided an intermittent task that is useful, intermittent, non-network dependent and relatively straightforward (so as not to be too distracting from the main task) without being sufficiently routine to make me think about automating it.
I've downloaded some 70 public domain novels as A4 PDF and I'm gradually working through them in gpdftext to tidy up the chapter headings and reformat as an A5 PDF, ready to be transferred back to my ebook reader.

This version of gpdftext isn't released yet (it's current SVN, 0.1.0) as it's in string freeze. However, it provides a fairly robust test of the next release.

Current list includes: Little Women, Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, Lady Susan, Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Peter Pan (Peter and Wendy), Lorna Doone: A Romance Of Exmoor, The Gap in the Curtain, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Through the Looking Glass (And What Alice Found There), Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe, The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Little Dorrit, Oliver Twist, The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Cranford, The Wind in the Willows, King Solomon's Mines, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Declaration of Independence, Just so Stories, Kim, The Jungle Book, The Man Who Would be King, The Arabian Nights, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, The Story of Doctor Dolittle, The Call of the Wild, The Game, White Fang, Moby Dick, Anne of Green Gables, The Well at the World's End, Pygmalion, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, East is West, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Jewel of Seven Stars, Anna Karenina, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Kama Sutra, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Aeneid of Virgil.

That should be enough for now.... (21 converted so far).

GPE packaging (at least for my own packages in GPE) has been added to svn.debian.org (alternative browser front end - my preference) and available via svn://svn.debian.org/pkg-gpe/.

Some packages have been converted to dpkg source format 3.0, although only for purposes of using the upstream .orig.tar.bz2 directly without repacking and for the purposes of testing svn-buildpackage 0.7.1 support.

1. Response times should dramatically improve on this new server - without flooding planets too. Together with Simon Waters, I've moved from a real (but tired) server to a snazzy virtual one with bytemark. Various other bits will be being updated and the new site will start to host more useful data on translations and string freezes in progress.

   
   

   DNS is currently updating, but over the next 24hours the old server should be able to take a rest before being finally powered down.




2. In other news, my house in Plymouth is now on the market - I'm preparing to relocate to Cambridge. No more pharmacy, it's time to work on embedded applications full time. It's going to be a chaotic few months ahead . . .

gPDFText is a text editor for GTK+ that opens PDF documents for ebook readers, converts the text contents into plain ASCII text, restores the original paragraphs and removes unwanted line breaks to allow easier zooming on the reader. gPDFText is now in Debian unstable and on a mirror near you. There are no obvious hindrances to a simple, clean migration into Squeeze and Ubuntu, once the necessary time has elapsed.

The current release is v0.0.2 and adds support for undo/redo as well as a few more translations, giving me six in all: Czech, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Swedish, for both the program and the Help Manual. Many many thanks to the translators concerned. (New translations are always welcome - the notable exception to the current list is French IMHO. Both POT files are included in the Debian source package via the upstream tarball. Just do apt-get source gpdftext, you'll find gpdftext-0.0.2/po/gpdftext.pot and gpdftext-0.0.2/help/gpdftext-help.pot. File wishlist bugs against gpdftext in the Debian BTS as normal, once your translation is complete, one bug for each PO file.) There's also the upstream bug tracker if you want to use that - you need to be logged into SourceForge - SF does support OpenID, not sure if you need an SF account or just the OpenID.

Just started adding PDF write support, so that the typical A4 PDF file can be rewritten as an A5 PDF as well as plain text. Initially, I thought I'd use libpoppler-glib directly but that's only for reading PDF. It can work with PS, so I tried that and libgs8 from ghostscript. Turned out that I should have been looking at cairo and pango all along. (Check out the buffer_to_ps function.) That said, I haven't actually got the full interface working yet, so I've yet to see just what kind of PDF I get.

This is part of the roadmap to go into version 0.1.0 along with some other interface additions, so the Manual will be getting some new content and the program a few new translatable strings. I'll make the usual string freeze announcements and call for updates when the time comes. I don't expect to be changing the existing strings much for 0.1.0.

I'm happy to add new translations based on 0.0.2 and then request an update once I know that 0.1.0 actually works.

First I thought a recent xorg update was just not recognising the trackpad and mouse buttons on the Acer Aspire1. Then I thought something was wrong with the Emdebian Grip installation of Squeeze, then I tried upgrading the kernel to 2.6.30 and just now I tried a Graphical Rescue Mode boot of the Lenny Debian Installer.

The trackpad is non-responsive, the mouse buttons are non-responsive. The trackpad still shows up in various system messages but simply doesn't move the pointer or activate any menus. Keyboard shortcuts still work but no mouse. (I gave away my USB mouse but I guess that's the next test.)

Could this be something other than the hardware failure that it appears?